Thank you very much. I was just gonna say I've got a little bit croaky this morning and a slight niggly cough. So if I'm about to cough, I will endeavour to find the mute button so I don't deafen you all, and you'll be very glad I'm not spraying any sort of, any pathogen.

Among you that on the other end of a laptop in the Welsh hills. So really, I'm going to talk about an approach to an abortion investigation. Oh, you've got a few pictures of me to show I like sheep and do a bit of running around as well.

So that's a bit of my background, but you've heard enough of that. And really what I'm going to do today, we're gonna have a bit of a run through the common causes. And OK, it's the common causes in the UK, similar causes elsewhere, and those of you that are dialling in from outside the UK, the rest of the presentation is entirely appropriate, and there's a couple of review articles if you wanna remind yourself more about the causes that I might not be going over.

Excuse me, and I can't find the mute button, so I'm sorry about that. A little bit of a picture of my sheep in the recent snowy weather. So without any further waffling.

We talk about abortion and discussing with your clients sort of how many is an abortion outbreak, when should we be sort of taking action or encouraging farmers to? A lot of the texts and historically we've always said, well, more than 3% is likely or possibly an infectious cause. But at Beginning of lambing, you might have 2000 sheep to lamb, you might have 20 sheep to lamb, however many sheep to lamb, and you've had a few abortions.

How do you know whether that's more than 3% of your sheep that are going to lamb? And even in the middle of lambing, how do you know where you've got to. So, whereas that might be a useful figure in hindsight, it's not really quite so useful at the time.

So more recently, we've been sort of talking about saying to farmers, well, if you get 3 or more abortions in one day, or abortion on 3 or more successive days. Now, you can use your own figures for that, but that's just a more practical way to talk about when to make that phone call to us as vets for advice, when to intervene. That's just, we've already had mention of AHDB, certainly the AHDB better returns programme, great source of information on sheep, not just figures, sort of information for farmers and vets, and that's just saying sort of average losses, 5.

6% up to birth and sort of 6 or 7% in those first few days. Not all of those are from abortion, other neonatal diseases, but that gives us an idea of sort of standard figures for the industry. Back to causes of abortion.

Now WVSE Wales Veterinary Science centre, where in Aberystwyth, one of the private partners for APHA and I speak as a director and doing some part-time work there. We have the contract for disease surveillance for sort of north and mid Wales. So this is the summary of last year, the 2017, lambing season.

And you can see no diagnosis in 39%, which is slightly less than the overall for England and Wales. But what I would say here, whereas it's usual to get a 40 to 43% no diagnosis, that is per submission, not per farm. And as I'll say later, we would always say submit further submissions, and we haven't managed to analyse the actual diagnosis on a case, you know.

An outbreak on a farm. Not unusual to have no diagnosis on the first submission, and then further submissions we will. But the standard one, and zootic abortion caused by Claydophyla tops the list, followed by toxoplasmosis, and then Campylobacter.

And the Vida figures, and this doesn't have, this is of the diagnosed conditions. So from positive diagnoses, 2014 to 2016, I think this was. But it actually doesn't matter the year because year on year, we find that laiddophila enzootic abortion is the commonest cause of diagnosis in sheep, followed by toxoplasma, then followed by Campylobacter.

Some years, Campylobacter is very close to 2nd place against toxoplasma as well. So just go, and I will no doubt labour this point again, but it is a little bit of a, a, a, a reflection on the sheep and maybe the veterinary industry that year on year, the two commonest causes of abortion in the UK sheep flock are caused by diseases that we have effective vaccines against. Shouldn't forget non-infectious causes.

Really, body condition, thin ewes will do their best to maintain a live lamb, but they will abort at the, you know, the point of no return. Living in the west and in Wales, west west of the UK, but you see all over the UK liver flu, common cause of thin ewes, common cause of problems, twin lamb disease, another reflection. Stress and handling too close to lambing, certainly.

It's maybe for routine vaccination, maybe for any reason. And I would generally say if you are in better condition, they are less likely to be affected. But always remember and discuss with our clients that when you are doing things to use in late pregnancy, to just remove them, whether it's from outside lambing, from the field or in.

From the shed in smaller groups, so they're not away from where they would be eating, chewing the cud, lying down, having a bit of water, and lying down for longer periods. Really, what we're talking about the non-infectious causes are mainly nutrition and management. Certainly in my part of the world, transport can be, should perhaps be sort of In there is a specific cause.

It's not unusual for sheep to be sent to better grazing for the winter, and if they're transported back, short or long distances too close to lambing, that can have a stressful effect, see, metabolic disease, and also maybe sometimes abortions. And that for you, we can see why she would probably not hold on to her lamb with that condition. Which of, which of the infectious causes are zoonosis?

We haven't actually got any questions for you in this, in this presentation, although I do pose some questions, you'll see I'll be answering them myself. There's some multiple choice with the notes. The references that I'll talk about as we go along are in the notes.

So really, this is just a list of some common causes of abortion in sheep. Most of them can be zoonotic. Some from the sheep and discharges themselves, others from the environment that the sheep are picking it up from.

But that does make it really important that we remember to give good advice, particularly pregnant women should avoid anything during with sheep. Around lambing, they shouldn't be handling sheep, they shouldn't be in the shed, shouldn't be feeding orphan lambs, or even washing dirty clothes that have been in the lambing shed, because, certainly enzootic and toxoplasma can cause abortions and serious illness in pregnant women, not common, but obviously very serious. But even outside just pregnant women, everybody who's handling the sheep should wash their hands regularly.

We certainly don't want to be contracting any of those diseases. And certainly while Q fever is not common in the UK, many of you and some of you may be, on the continent have had more experience, and many of us will have heard of a serious outbreak a few years ago where people were affected and even, stopped breeding goats in Holland for, for 12 months. To say these, these are some serious diseases, but I've already mentioned this and you'll find I might repeat it, which can you vaccinate against.

Enzootic and toxoplasma, the commonest ones, there are now effective vaccines and have been for some time. I say now, because actually the vaccines I qualified before we had the toxoplasma vaccine and some of the early enterotic vaccines were not as effective, but the current ones, and this, these have been available for over 20 years, are very effective. In the southern hemisphere, we have vaccines against Campylobacter, tend to get a little bit of a different disease presentation than we do in the UK which I will mention because I've got one slide on Campylobacter.

So the economics of vaccination, if you want to be discussing this with your clients, you know, before tapping or after they've had a problem, hopefully before. There's been, and again, you will have the reference, a study in the Southwest in 2014 or 2013 written up in 2014 found the benefits of vaccination against EAE and Toxo, lower fall in stock charges, there aren't those huge amounts of dead lambs to dispose of and obviously a lot for more lands raised, which was saving abortion costs of around 130 pounds per case of abortion per year. And you, in your practises will be able to discuss that against the cost of the vaccine, your, the the cost you charge for one dose of the vaccine by the number of lamb crops per year, and because the vaccines are really one dose per life of the sheep.

And that's the reference in the In practise article that has the costs. Little bit of a rule of thumb done by Leslie Stubbins, well-known sheep consultant. You take the percentage incidence of abortion in the flock, triple that figure, and reduce the gross margin per U by this amount.

Like me, you may find that a number of your clients actually don't know the gross margin per U. We do struggle to have accurate figures. Can still talk about this, and the other thing I've found in my experience, that all really keen sheet clients who absolutely know their gross margin, my experience of those is they tend to be higher vaccinators, they understand the value of preventive medicine, and they're probably already vaccinating.

So a little quick reminder of some of the commonest causes, enzootic abortion, that is you to you spread, so ewes are becoming infected in one year and they abort the next lambing, not necessarily the next year, and if you lambs are infected by. Some of this discharge, we can see on the back of the udder of the ewe. You can imagine the first mouthful for a ewe lamb that you may keep for breeding could be full of enzootic abortion.

And if they don't lamb in the first year, they will, they will abort in their first lambing. And if you have very prolonged lambing periods over many weeks, then er later lambing ewes if they're mixed with these, could possibly abort in the same lambing, very unusual. Once affected, ewes become carriers and they become latent carriers.

It causes a placenitis, so this is a heavily infected, quite a characteristic placenta. We can see here the cotyledons a bit less affected and this real thickened with a bit of a purulent type discharge. You don't always get the discharge, but a thickened into coillidenary area.

You, you may just find areas of the afterbirth, the placenta affected, not always the whole placenta. If you see a placenta like that, it's characteristic but not diagnostic because other infections will cause a placenitis and certainly some salmonellas will cause a placenitis, although you tend to sometimes have more sick uses and sort of more affected-looking lungs than you get with enzootic. So just a reminder that the discharges, the placental material, highly infectious.

While it doesn't survive outside the sheep by itself for more than a few hours, in the, in blood, tissue, bits of afterbirth will survive for at least a couple of weeks. So in uncleared out straw with bits of blood and tissue in, that can certainly be a risk. Little reminder of the cycle of infection, you're getting these late abortions.

Other ewes become infected. They're heavily in lands, so they land normally, but they have that latent infection inside the womb until the next year, and they don't produce antibodies until after abortion c. Disease, so we cannot test these ewes to see which of the danger ones.

That ticking time bomb sort of starts going at about day 90 of pregnancy, and when the replicating Clamoophilus caused enough of a placenitis, the lamb pops out. Lambs often appear quite normal. They're not necessarily sort of a diseased looking or mummified themselves, but they're.

Dead or dying too too premature to survive. A little quick reminder about #2, toxoplasma, not sheep to sheep, but an environmental. Here we're getting young cats start hunting for the first time, they're eating rodents, mice, rats, become infected.

For the first time and will pass out large numbers of toxo oocy or eggs in their faeces onto pasture if they're outside, onto bedding, if they're sort of nesting in the sheds anywhere. After a few weeks, they become immune and are not at risk of passing more of these irresists, but if they become immune suppressed, which commonly is a female cat having kittens, maybe tom cats fighting, older unwell cats, they will become infectious again. And if a pregnant ewe meets these these eggs wherever, then they become infected and you have clinical signs.

If a non-pregnant ewe is exposed to infection, then she becomes immune and it's not a problem. So really, these are infected, these oocysts will survive on pasture, they'll survive freezing, they'll survive warm weather, so they'll survive on pasture for at least a year, if not more, and also inside in an inside environment. And Early in infection early in pregnancy, you'll get reabsorption if the tup's not there, it has been removed, higher number of barrenus, mummified lambs a bit later in pregnancy, and then you're getting abortions, stillborn lambs, sometimes with live litter mates and then these poor weekly lambs that take a lot of time and energy and either die or never really come to much.

This, this, well, when I say I love this, pictorial thing, I find when I realised these figures a few years ago, it really brought home to me the kind of environmental contamination we have. And I think it's a they're great figures to give to farmers to understand how with biosecurity, you're not going to prevent toxo. So we're talking, the average weight of this charming cat dropping we get there is apparently 50 grammes.

And the average number of toxo eggs, if that's from an infected excreting cat, is 1 million per gramme. So that gives us a fairly impressive figure of 50 million eggs per dollop of cat faeces, and we know it's about 200 needed to infect a ewe. So we can understand, particularly, we can understand how outside they will last for a long time.

And in the shed, if you're shaking straw, those infected OSS eggs will be there long after the cat faeces has sort of desiccated, gone, not gone away, blown away, not really visible. If you're shaking straw around a shed, you can understand how you're shaking a lot of infection around. You sometimes get characteristic signs on the placenta, these little white spots of necrosis on the cotyledons.

You don't see it in all in all ways, but I say, it's characteristic, not absolutely diagnostic, but fairly so. Though with modern testing, it's actually the foetal fluid that we look at, more reliably for a positive toxo, we will find it from that placenta. Number 3 is Campylobacter, which is spread.

You have carrier ewes that will excreted in faeces, also spread by wildlife, often birds. So we often see outbreaks in outdoor lambing or sheep that are still being fed outside. And one reason turning outside feeding, turning feeding troughs over after the sheep.

Have been fed to try and dissuade birds from coming to pick up the last bits and bird, you know, defecating in or around the troughs, which are a risk factor for the sheep. You get abortion storms that often look very much like an enzootic, but unlike enzootic, if sheep get infected outside pregnancy, they become immune. With enzootic abortion, we realise we don't get the immunity until after either abortion or vaccination.

There's no particular treatment, although Campylobacter is susceptible to a range of antibiotics, while by the time you get an abortion storm, it's usually there and the damage done. Importance of isolating infected ewes, and I say there are vaccines available in the southern hemisphere. But the New Zealand picture of Campylobacter tends to be abortion outbreaks in the same flock year on year.

So, vaccines to prevent that. In the UK situation, we generally find you'll get an abortion storm one year, and then, and then you get a level of immunity in the flock, and you don't get further problems until you get quite a lot of naive sheep again, which can be several years down the line. Although I am aware of a few UK flocks that are seeing repeated problems year on year, and there it is possible to import the vaccines under a special licence and SDC via the VND who .

And it's worth looking into that if you're getting a different scenario. Abortion causes liver lesions. This is a picture of a liver from a lamb that was confirmed with Campylobacter abortion, but it's actually the foetal stomach contents we want to, for our diagnosis, we want sent to the lab or that I looked at the campi is ice is cultured from in the lab.

So that's a classical liver from a campy lab. Quick bit about border disease which doesn't appear on the scale, but can be quite dramatic in individual flocks, depends on the stage of pregnancy when infected, so the actual outcome is very similar to toxoplasma. The disease is the sheep equivalent of BVD, and you do get BVD abortions in sheep as well, but the labs will differentiate between BVD and border disease.

But like BVD, you get these persistently infected lambs born. These are the affected lambs, and after the name hairy shakker, they often have a different. Goat bit, the hairier coat, and they have a fine tremor.

Although like, you know, similar to BVD, you will also get PI lambs that don't appear that unwell and will grow and they will breed as well and take disease to new flocks. There's no treatment or sheep vaccine available, so, Control is talking about trying to find and eliminate PIs. Maybe mixing the sheep when non-pregnant to spread immunity, and that's as long as you know you haven't got an entotic problem as well, or in a, a well vaccinated flock for enterotic.

Possibly underdiagnosed and it similar to BVD it does have an effect on the immune system. I did have a little video of a shaky lamb. Unfortunately my IT skills failed me showing you the video, but sort of that's a poor shaky lamb there.

Othering causes are important to the individual, maybe not necessarily to the flock as a whole. I've got a little picture at the end of this slide of a Listeria abortion. Just want to say there, a lot of the techs say you don't get, the neurological outbreak, abortion due to Listeria in the same flux as you're getting a neurological outbreak.

Well, I do beg to diff. 2 years ago, we had a small neurological outbreak in the sheep at home. We had 3 sheepor over a week.

So 2 were very old, so I thought, oh, it could be a bit of Enzo, they're 10 years old, they were vaccinated 9 years ago. Third one young, took it to the lab with me on a working day, and we did diagnosed Listeria abortion. We actually only had one more after that.

So you do get both outbreaks together on occasion. But also no diagnosis does not mean not infectious. Maybe poor samples, the incorrect samples sent away if we can't say send the whole lamb an afterbirth.

Often no placenta sent, and that's really pretty important for enzootic, the number one contamination of samples, mummified lambs, the pathogens are quite often gone or can't be isolated. From there. So I always say send further samples.

That's a picture of it, that's not mine, because the one I had looked was about 2 weeks before term, completely formed, looking very like an enzootic, abortion, and I didn't find the afterbirth to look for lesions. But this is the liver lesions you find in a Listeria abortion, little milling necrotic lesions throughout the liver. But again, it's the foetal stomach contents for diagnosis.

Those references, Rebecca Mearns has done an excellent two articles in in practise, about, abortion in sheep, and I've done a little article in UK Vet. Those are in your notes. So move it so there's, there's plenty of ways to get a lot more information about the causes of abortion.

So really moving on to what do we do and what do we tell our clients to do. And some of these things, I think, you know, we really want to be able to, to be immediately the clients are ringing us to give this advice, so they want to be able to, what's best to do as well as get a diagnosis. So isolating and permanently marking the you is very important.

When we talk about marking the you, there will be a number. Of keen clients have got EID and that's great. You can use things like pitch.

Something that a lot of farmers like the idea of, and this idea was given to me at a farmer at a meeting a couple of years ago, is just using cable ties. This guy was using a black cable tie, anything you had abortion, different coloured cable tie for anything that he wanted to call for other reasons. And, cheap and cheerful, you can either put it through the hole where the ear tag goes or just loop them through the ear tag.

Sending samples away for diagnosis, ideally fresh lambs and placenta going into clean bags for diagnosis. Also really important to remind them to dispose of all the material carefully. And if no diagnosis or samples aren't able to be sent away at the time, it's certainly possible to blood test for, enzootic, toxo and border disease up to, ideally sort of up to about 6 weeks after the abortion, but it can be useful a little bit later than that.

Give the advice about not fostering potential ewe lamb replacements onto aborted ewes, whether this is a farmer retaining their own ewe lambs, or they may be selling them for breeding, because if it does turn out to be enzootic, as we thought before, those lambs may be getting mouthfuls of claidophyla when, off the back of the udder or around the teats as they're going for, as they're going for their first drink of Colostrum, and then they're going to be infected. But removing the aborted ewes from the communal pen or from the lambing field outside as soon as possible and keeping them separate for up to about 6 weeks. Now, we said enzoootic probably lasts sort of 2 or 3 weeks, outside the animal in some discharge.

I like to say, we'll say 6 weeks and then they're certainly going to be kept separate for about 3 or 4 weeks, hopefully. Removing the bedding from the area and spraying with disinfectant, we said, you know, Whatever the cause, it, they, the pathogens will live longer in the afterbirth and discharge, so removing as much of that and the infected straw and spraying, and outdoor lambing, certainly picking up any bits of afterbirth that are left behind, if possible, having a bit of a spray on the area and disposing more safely. Now the two I've highlighted in yellow are really, I think, if farmers can't do.

Anything and remembering it's a really busy time of year. If we're not going to do any of the other things, the two really important things to concentrate on are getting those aborting uses away from the rest of the flock as soon as possible and keeping them separate, and also removing all the contaminated material as soon as possible. So concentrate on those.

And so in practise, we're thinking about the different scenarios that we, we will come up against. We might start with the first phone call, my user aborting, I need antibiotics, a little bit more helpful my user aborting, what's the cause, so we know now that we want to look for a diagnosis, or my user aborting, what do I do help. So ideally, we want to convert the first phone conversation to one of the others.

And when I talk about sort of, when I've mentioned protocols and talked about having sort of information. And I think our receptionists are taking those phone calls, my user reporting, I need antibiotics. Now many of you will already have flyers or crib sheets.

I think it's really useful to have. The kind of crib sheet with what to do in the face of abortion, what samples to take, and hopefully be able to translate that into doing some diagnostics or speaking to the vet and maybe arranging a visit. But certainly so that we don't just get the message when on a busy day you're out in the car, what antibiotic, you know, Mr.

Mr. Or Mrs. Farmer has rung up for 3 boxes of long-acting Oxitec because they've got an abortion outbreak.

We hope we want to, Turn that into a rational use of antibiotics and also rational use of, you know, rational investigation and actually giving some useful help to our farmers. And interestingly, going back to when the the, the first presentation this morning, it started with sort of a little bit of a different approach to vaccinations in different countries, . Which I meant meant to mention earlier, where she did talk about certainly on the continent, there may be a higher uptake of vaccination than we might see in our herds and flocks.

So we shouldn't forget that this is a really stressful time for farmers and for us. So on the farm, there's dead lambs, there's weekly lambs, they're taking time to look after the weekly lambs, so it's quite depressing. There's used to foster on, which is certainly a frustrating job.

Everyone's quite tired. There's an economic loss. We talk a lot about the economic loss.

There's also a big emotional loss. Farmers, the vast majority of farmers take pride in their stock, and they actually care and they love, they like, love for whatever their stock, and it's a big emotional loss to be picking up dead lambs every day, and you can understand why they don't want to actually count the dead lambs. It's less for the economic than actually for the toll on them.

And then not to forget, it's a stressful time for us as vets as well. You get the phone call, the farmer is trying, not trying to, the farmer has a problem. We as vets think we're here to solve all the problems, so we're almost taking on their problems if we're not careful what to do.

We want to get answers soon. But also action. I'm going back, even if we haven't got answers, and we can't actually solve the abortion problem straight away, there's still action we can give.

We can talk about how important it is to remove those ewes from that area. We can talk about where you might put them, and certainly that advice. And I hope we've sort of drawn up so it's on the top of our brain and also got some little advice sheets to send out to our farmers, because we don't always remember what we're talking about.

We need to remember that the average age of the UK sheep farmer is actually a little. Bit more than my age, and I know I don't remember things as well. And, and there are a lot of young, dynamic, really keen sheep farmers.

It's also a very busy time, and they're trying to think about a lot of things. So don't always expect to remember every bit of telephone advice. So the action, what do we want to do?

Well, the gold standard is to convert that telephone call to a visit to the farm, and then, you know, going back to Owen's, the last presentation, he talked a lot about housing, and I could, you know, divert here to talking an awful lot about housing for sheep as well. And as vets, we probably see the housing that our sheep are kept in a lot less than the than the cattle housing. It's not unusual.

We probably have an awful lot of sheep farmers that we actually don't get to visit their sheds or we don't get to visit them when they're full or in the middle of lambing. And it can be an eye opener in both directions. You can walk into a shed and your heart can sink a bit because you think, oh gosh, there is so much going on here, you know, this.

The environment, the space, the cleanliness, you can understand why there may be disease outbreaks, and I'm probably talking about neonatal lamb disease, but also spreading, abortion infections. But there are a lot of other places where you go and you can walk in and think. And I've been to, I've been to farms, sort of, I think there's some pictures, I'm not sure it's this slide or a bit of a later slide, where I went on a farm and they'd already landed 1000 ewes, and you walked in, you just thought, wow, this is so clean, and they've got traditional buildings, but they are doing it so well.

So, your eyes can be opened in both ways, but I, I can't sort of underemphasize how useful it is to actually get on the farm. You can examine you, body condition score, the body condition score of a you is, you know, throughout her life is a real key performance indicator, and that is the clue to her fertility, the colostrum she produced. And the lamb's health, growth and weaning weight.

Also, the general health of the lambs, and you can take some blood samples that if you don't get a diagnosis, you can use later, because you can certainly store blood. So spin down and store, store blood samples and look, and look for some serology at a later date. You can also make sure the right samples are being taken for diagnosis.

But if we can't convert it to the gold standard, then at least we want to give the advice, the real necessary advice, and I'm sorry if I'm labouring the point a bit here, removing the aborted us as soon as possible, removing the bedding, and maybe the blood sampling within 6 weeks, if no diagnosis. And going back to the visiting farm, even on the best farms, there's often little things that we can do, and the keenest farmers and the ones who are doing, doing everything really well, are often the ones that are more likely to take up on just small different things, and an outside pair of eyes can be really useful, and we can give advice about things. About where you could put a few individual pens so that any you that's supporting goes to a set area of the individual pens.

I can completely understand they may want to foster lambs on, but you don't want them to go into an individual lambing pen that another you that is unaffected may go into at a later date, however well you clear it out. Yeah, these are pictures of a farm, they'd already had 1000 ewes. And that there was a little bit of S4C filming going on this day, so it was extra clean.

But I have been to that farm at other times, and it is remarkably clean in old traditional buildings. This is what we call the nursery pen, so this is where ewes go in, just to check everything's mothered up when they come out of an individual pen. And that's old system, we don't really like seeing too much sort of wood, cos it's harder to disinfect, but nice clean running pens.

So sampling What, so, we've either been out or farmers have brought samples in, what do we need to send to the lab? Again, gold standard, fresh aborted lambs plus placenta, if you can get it, in a clean, secure bag. Placenta, much more likely to get, a diagnosis if that's along with the lambs.

You will get an enzootic positive without placenta sometimes, but the placenta's the gold standard for that. Remembering to label it way. Well, particularly if someone else is taking the samples to a lab.

If it's not possible to take those samples in, then what do you want to take yourself? Well, I've said placenta, you want to include at least one coilledden area, coilledden, a, a, a portion of intercoillidenary area, and any bits that look abnormal with lesions. Put those into a good sample pot, secure.

You want foetal stomach contents collected aseptically by vacutainer. Now, often they are quite viscous, but usually if you pull the needle in and out a bit, you can get enough into a vacutainer. You don't need a lot because this is for a culture, so you only need, you don't need and vacutainer, plain red top.

You don't need a full one, you only need a mil or so, but quite often you can get, you can get a full one quite easily. Also, free foetal fluid, sort of a mil or so of fluid, even less, we can often get a diagnosis, but ideally a mil or more of fluid from the thorax or if there's not enough free foetal fluid from the, abdomen as well. It often looks quite bloody as well.

Take that by a new pipette into a sterile collecting pot, into a new sterile collecting pot, or certainly a clean new collecting pot, . A bijo or a universal container. If you suspect border disease, also take some spleen.

And I actually tend to like to take some spleen as well, and it can be stored in the freezer for months for looking at later. The routine investigation at the APHA and private partners and SRUC labs doesn't include border disease, but if you've taken spleen and either sent it for them to freeze or you've frozen it, and you can send it on, you can look for border disease later. If the signs are highly suggestive of border disease, then the investigation will include it as well, but you need to say that.

So bags taken, really, you should have 2, actually 2 gloves on, so we're not infecting ourselves, and we need some afterbirth as well. So back to the visit, you know, I have said some of this, the other benefits is you're going to see the sheep, see the housing and facilities, space, cleanliness, feed, and, you know, feed allowances as well. If we don't have enough forage space, then sheep, they they have their own social groups, so that's why they need enough lying space, enough space in the pen.

And also they have a hierarchy. So if we don't have enough forage space, even though it appears we're putting forage out fairly often, there will be sheep at the lower end of the pecking order that are not getting access often enough, and they may be the. Thinner ones as well, which could be relevant if you're getting abortion due to poor body condition.

But what whatever reason the abortions is, never turn down the opportunity if you're persuaded to get a visit to go and have a look at all that. And if you're getting an abortion outbreak sort of well before lambing, or, you know, a couple of weeks before the main flock of lambing, you're not into the real swing of it. Certainly, whenever you visit, I would be keen to body condition course and news, but you can also talk about whether it's useful to take some bloods for a metabolic check, looking at, protein, urea, and beta hydroxy, 2 to 3 weeks, a couple of weeks before lambing to 3 weeks, can give us a real good fine tuning of the nutrition to check that you, that there is enough energy and protein that that those lambs are gonna get some really good colostrum.

And once you're well underway of the lambing, the neonatal lamb check, I think, certainly the first presentation we talked, about veterinary involvement and sort of the, the young stock was not at the highest on the farmer and vet interaction, but we were. Over 40% of the vet and farmer interacting about care of young stock, I would say it's a lot lower for lambs. We've had quite a focus on young stock health in cattle and talking about looking at looking at the environments, and as I was talking about looking at calf housing, but also, a lot of us, or we've talked about blood sampling calves to check for total protein on a refractometer or submitting to a lab for zinc sulphate.

It's not, it's probably not routinely done enough in calves. It's not done nearly enough, I think, in lambs. I do tend to sort of, preach that a little bit, but really useful thing to do.

And certainly towards the beginning of lambing or any time in lambing, when we talk about neonatal disease, these sort of things. We should be looking at. So converting that phone call, my lamb's reporting, I want 3 boxes of Oxyt LA to a visit where you can give an awful lot of advice and hopefully your client sees the benefit of that is, you know, a, a, a gold star tick to do.

And if you, from my point of view, if you can convert maybe 1 out of 10 of those phone calls to a visit, you're increasing, increasing your involvement with your sheep farmers, and when it gets to useful, your sheep farmers do talk a lot to each other as well. So, blood testing lambs, these are just, if you're not, happy, I find lambs quite easy to blood test if they come into the surgery or, or anyway, some people like to lie them flat on the table. This was, this was the coordinator or project I was doing, came out to help me.

We had about 100 lambs to test, so he's holding them, really just with the neck slightly extended, and then when you. Get your thumb in there, in the jugular groove, it's usually quite easy to rate a brain. I rarely find any need to clip in lambs.

So people are worried about that, they're usually quite straightforward, but it's all down to the handling and getting them held properly, as is, blood testing adult sheep. That's what I always say. It's not our ability or lack of ability, it's getting them held in the right, the right place, which is down to us to advise, obviously.

Excuse me a sec. Right, sorry, quick drink of water and I'll be back. Right.

OK, so going back to that phone call about wanting those 3 boxes of whatever antibiotics, what about them? How useful are antibiotics in the face of an abortion outbreak? Well, certainly Oxitec may be useful in the face of an enzootic abortion outbreak.

It's actually only effective when the organism becomes active, so that's why multiple injections for foot rot on any individual ewe over the year will not have killed off the clamodophila she's carrying, so it's, and it's not implicated for future control. There is a space maybe when a farmer's had enzootic abortion, diagnosed, they go forward to vaccinate. Remember, vaccines are there to prevent disease, prevent animals picking up disease rather than cure disease already there.

Having said that, the enzootic abortion vaccines will decrease the number of abortions. In sheep already infected, but they won't completely prevent, and that's not what vaccines are designed to do. So in the first year of vaccinating for enzootic abortion, it may be appropriate to inject some of the sheep with Oxitec, and particularly the multiples.

And when we think of that, it causes a placenitis, so When the placenta is too damaged, the lambs aren't getting nutrition. That's when they become, that's when they sort of pop out or become aborted. The more lambs inside the womb, the, the slightly less placenta they have each anyway or space for placental development.

So the organism, the clamodophylla becomes active at about day 90, so there is a window of use for using Oxitec before the damage is done. The infected users still excrete lamodophylla and it doesn't prevent ewes becoming infected. The there is certainly some evidence that the usefulness in the face of an outbreak, it certainly gives us something to do, and we all, the farmer and us as vets, feel a lot better.

You're, there's there's no way of knowing whether you were coming to the end of the abortion storm or not, but certainly Oxitet is effective. Again Clamoopyla. But again, in the future, there are effective vaccinations used.

And I would say that anyone that's buying in use, unless they're buying them from enzootic free accredited flock, should really be vaccinating already, because one day they will buy it in even if they haven't yet. Antibiotics not really implicated for any of the other causes where, oh dear, spelling mistake there, sorry about that. I can see where toxo toxoplasma is sensitive to sulfonamides, but it's likely that a lot of the infection is historical.

It's not that likely that on the day you inject all the sheep is the day that, that, that they. They have recently infected and that injection is going to kill the toxo off, and we can't really be, injecting or prescribing antibiotics for the whole rest of pregnancy. Similar for Campylobacter.

One different, sometimes some salmonella species there are several, there are more than one species, several species that cause abortion in sheep, and some of them will cause systemic disease, so. Your antimicrobial treatment sort of may be indicated for your health, but that's very much an individual case and sensitivity to be discussed with the lab. And quite if when we get a salmonella outbreak, certainly, particularly if it's a zoonotic strain of salmonella, there may well be some involvement from the labs or some APH involvement with some advice.

And just to remind you, whatever the cause or no cause, always give your laboratory a ring, give them a ring about what samples you want to send in, if you can't remember or you're not sure, or when you get results that. You'd like clarifying or you've sent samples and not had a result, please feel free to ring and discuss the quality of the samples you sent in, what else you could do, and, you know, the, the, the labs are all staffed by vets who are happy to talk about disease and there to help, really. Vaccination, said that'd be enzootic abortion.

There are 2 live and 1 dead vaccines available now. There's only one Toxo vaccine, which is a live vaccine. They're fragile vaccines, so do need to be treated with care, kept at the correct temperature, and a whole different issue is the kind of fridges available on farms, but treated with care, made up and administered correctly.

And they're licenced to give sort of the live vaccines are licenced to give within 4 weeks to 4 months before topping, or to you lambs from 5 months old. The enzootic dead vaccine can certainly be used at other times as well. Picture of one of my ewes with healthy twins, and I suppose you should declare conflict of interest.

I'm an independent sheep vet, but well, I'm a, yeah, I do consultancy for MSD Animal Health one day a week on the sheep side who make one of the live ends up. Abortion vaccines and the Toxo vaccine. Our flock at home has all been vaccinated against Enzo and Toxo for many years before I did any work for MSD actually, and I don't get any kind of discount on the vaccinations, but we certainly continue year on year, because that's the picture I want to see, my you with two lambs.

Finishing up with the action we want to take, the action for us and all the practise staff action for the farmer to take, at the outbreak of abortion and following up. So I have mentioned a couple of times about having some advice. Yes, hopefully when we get a diagnosis, anything from the lab will be straight on the phone to give some advice.

Have said, and I think it's important to follow that up with written advice, remembering stressful time of year, we all need to hear things more than once for them to sink in sometimes and advice given over the telephone may not be remembered correctly or may not all be written. Many of you will already have, Leaflets or practise handouts on what to do in the face of an abortion or on the specific diseases. I'd certainly, if you don't have them, I would suggest really useful to do and feel free to use any material that, that may be the slightest bit useful I've put in the notes.

I don't know how useful, but any material. For, the initial, what do I do with this phone call, what does that farmer do, . At the outbreak of an abortion, plus the follow up, the, the advice, phone and written for what do I do for future control and prevention after the abortion outbreak I've had and maybe also for other infections in the future.

I also say to follow up. It can be a bit daunting when a farmer's had quite a big abortion outbreak. You rung them with some results, things aren't going well, to then phone them again a week later.

You're expecting doom and gloom on the other end of the phone, but generally, they were even. Even if, you know, even if you haven't got any specific magic wand, yes, I'll do this and all these sheep will stop aborting. They do, they are thankful for some kind of concern and a follow up.

Sorry, the brain went a bit blank there, yes. So, always useful to do, even just a quick chat, how are things going? Have you managed to, separate all the sheep out?

Have we had a diagnosis? Do you want me to come and do some bloods, or I'll give you a ring, another ring, sort of, you know, after this all over with a plan of action for next year. Talking about vaccination, for both clients that haven't had problems and those that do have problems, I'm not here to be selling vaccination, but as I said at the outset, it's quite depressing really that the two commonest causes of abortion in the UK are preventable.

Reminders, sales phone calls for all your clients, in your practise newsletters, or having specific phone calls for your clients that have had an abortion problem. Certainly, in Aberystwyth the Wales Veterinary Science centre, what we've done the last couple of years is for individual practises to send them a list of their clients, with the diagnosis they've had after the lambing season, so that can help to remember the specific phone calls. And then lastly, really just checking and revising your practise protocol.

And I hope I've given a little bit of information that you can include in there. I'm thinking of having both handouts and checklists handy for you to go through, because it's not always easy. And certainly, you know, if you're in the middle of the night carving a cow and you've been asked chapter and verse about what to do about the user boarding in the next shed, you know, it's not always easy to have it right in the, top of your mind.

Right, I've not quite overrun and I started a bit late, so I'm now finishing. I added this after I saw when to put a nice picture of the first cow she carved. Well, this is a few of my lambs at home a couple of years ago on a rare sunny day in the Brecon Beacons, and that's what we want to see.

Healthy lambs. I don't keep them all alive, I have to say. A Little bit of a summary, we've talked about the common causes, the action to take during an outbreak.

We've talked about correct sampling and for my lab work, that is very important. And also following up action for us as vets and for the farmers. So for those of you who aren't Welsh speakers, this says the end.

And then I've just got a gratuitous picture of the Himalayas from Bhutan, where I went recently. Fabulous. Thank you very much, Kate, for your webinar, providing an overview of courses, and practical advice when faced with an outbreak of abortion on sheep farms.

I found it very useful, and I'm sure our attendees did as well. And there's lots of comments and questions coming through. But just before we go to the questions and comments, I mentioned earlier in the session, the our vet really appreciate your feedback.

So if you could spare 30 seconds to complete the feedback survey that hopefully has popped up in a new tab in your browser, that would be fantastic. And this feedback survey is anonymous, unless you provide your contact details. So if you would like a response to your feedback, please make sure that you include your name and email address.

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Alternatively, you can add feedback in the comments section on the website. The webinar vet team will be sending delegates an email to let you know when the webinar recordings are available to view on the website. So, first question.

When you were talking about the Toxo Quick quiz, we had a comment, from someone who thought it was a good argument for trap, neuter, and release of cats. Would you agree with this? And in your experience, of farmers proactive in this area when they've had a problem with Toxo?

Great question, thank you. And sorry, I've just had a massive coughing outbreak, so if it starts again, I'll mute again, but that's fine. Yes, I think, I, I, I actually took that bit of a slide about what to do with the cats out because I was a bit pushed for time.

But yeah, very much so. And when I speak to farmers, I always say to control toxo, don't get rid of your own cats. Keep a small.

Healthy population, a really big, yeah, a really big, reason to neuter cats and keep them healthy, worm them regularly and just sort of look after them. And if you've got your own healthy population, they are far less likely to be infected and they're more likely to keep other cats away from the area. Unfortunately, as most farmers will buy in, if not forage, some of their, some or all of their straw, you've no idea what you're buying in with it.

So Toxo is still a risk, but certainly, yes, I absolutely agree with that. And, you know, because some farmers, when you talk about cats, say, oh I cats, yes, good idea to get rid of them. And then I do talk about, no, actually it's better to keep a few healthy ones and .

Certainly, I'm thinking back many years ago, one of my big sheep and beef clients did have a toxo outbreak, and they had a lot of sort of quite poor cats on the place. So I couldn't persuade them to neuter them, but I went in and I got them all, and the practise just neutered them all. And then he was the man who was telling everybody in the market, Well, of course, you should neuter all your cats, and they're much healthier, and they're better rashers, and they don't spread toxo, so that's brilliant.

Thank you. There's the power of the converted. Exactly, yes.

Next, what are your top tips on minimising the risk of obtaining inconclusive results from samples that are submitted to diagnostic labs? Certainly fresh samples. I may not have mentioned enough about fresh.

We talk a lot about if you're submitting a postmortem to the lab, it doesn't want to be more than sort of 24 hours dead because things are mortalized and we can't get useful postmortem material. Well, remembering an abortion is a postmortem. As well.

So fresh samples on a Monday morning, if there's been a lot of abortions on sort of Friday, you and you submit those, you're really lowering the chance of getting, you know, getting a result. You really want the freshest abortions, . Definitely having placenta, and if you can get lambs and placenta and more than one outbreak, so from two cases taken directly to our lab as soon as possible, yes.

If that's not possible, definitely following the protocol I took, so you take the right samples, placenta really important, foetal fluid, foetal stomach contents to go with it as well. And I say, the fresher the better. Thank you, Kate.

There's obviously a lot to consider in terms of the causes of abortion, public health, samples to take, the economics, and also mental health in terms of dealing with stress, the stress of an outbreak. In your experience, if you list just a handful of these factors, does that help to start a more proactive preventative dialogue with sheep farmers compared to dealing with the face of an outbreak? Yes, yeah, very much so.

I think if I've understood the, yes, I think so, discussing, and I, I would always like to start the discussion with having some empathy and saying, oh, you know, this is a really bad time when the farmers, in the face of an outbreak and leading on, but there are a lot of things we can do to help and, you know, it's really useful to work together. But also when talking to Farmers, sort of, you know, pre-tucking or after lambing, whether that's in practise meetings or just when, when, when you're, you know, when you're dealing with them, whether it's a sheep or cattle, talking about abortion prevention and talking about, there are a lot of things we can do, you know, let's, let's discuss this because we want to try and avoid an outbreak as well. But certainly showing some empathy during an outbreak.

Also trying not to just take all our farmers' problems on ourselves. I think, and I think over the years, I, I've sort of struggled with that because, you know, you might see, you've got a farmer that you've been out to and done a really difficult calving in the middle of the night, and they're struggling to get colostrum down that calf, and is the cow OK and you're worried is the cow OK? And then you've got to phone, you've got a phone call about an abortion outbreak.

And then another farmer's got calves scaring, and, you know, he's struggling, he or she is struggling with that quite often she. And there's, there's quite a risk that we take all those problems on, and we think, oh, we've got to solve all these. So those farmers have given the problems to us.

It's important that we give them elsewhere, you know, passing on the problems. So, obviously dealing with them, but not feeling that we've got Take everybody's problems on, but having sort of having a rational discussion, the points that we want to get over and saying, and this is how we're going to address this problem. So whereas we might not got rid of it, we've got our own ideas for how we're going to address it, so we can sort of tick that box, we are addressing that for that farmer, and it's up to them whether they continue with that, but we've done our best to do that.

I think that's a, a really great point that you make there, Kate. You know, often you can feel overwhelmed, like you say, taking on everyone's problems and, you know, do you need to help share the load, with your colleagues and also the farmers, taking ownership as well of things that they can be doing. So it's not just all on the vet to be, sorting everything out for them.

We've got some praise and a comment for you here, Kate, so great session, Kate, thank you very much. I already specify on the labels that vaccines must be refrigerated, but after a recent flock visits, I'm beginning to wonder if I should specify that, the fridge must be plugged in and switched on. I kid you not.

No, I, I believe you. There was a very interesting project done on, a range of public cattle farms actually, and farmers who were happy to have data loggers in their fridges, so they didn't think they'd got anything to hide, some of, a number of farms showing the range of temperatures with inside a fridge, and one of those wasn't turned on. And also worryingly, whereas for live vaccines, we're probably more worried about fluctuations in temperature or going above the temperature range.

For dead vaccines, so yeah, you know, your Clostridial vaccines, your foot rock vaccines, some of the other dead vaccines, we're much more worried about them getting frozen or going down to 0 or below, which a lot of commercial domestic fridges are not so good at keeping the temperature up. And there were some, yeah, there were. Some very eye opening ranges.

And actually, the message I take from that is trying to talk more with our farmers, explain how, if you're buying from, whether it's the farmers' co op or the vet, we have a, you know, a medical fridge, which costs many hundreds or thousands, whereas your fridge, even if it's a good domestic fridge, won't be the same. And so really think about buying the vaccines as close to use as possible. So there's actually less opportunity for fluctuations in, in how they're kept.

Yeah, that's great advice as well. Thank you very much, Kate. We'll just wrap up the session now with another comment that's just come through, say, brilliant webinar, please ask Kate to do some more webinars.

Cool, thank you. So thank you to Kate and also Wendler and Owen.